THE SUSPENDED BANKER

See Also: BRIDGES Blackfriars Bridge; ITALIANS; MURDERS

Roberto Calvi was the President of Banco Ambrosiano, an Italian bank. His links to The Vatican led to him being nicknamed 'God's Banker'. In 1982 the company collapsed. Subsequently, £800m was found to be missing. Mr Calvi s last known abode was a flat on the eighth floor of the Chelsea Cloisters building. In July 1982 his corpse was found hanging from one of the arches of Blackfriars Bridge. It had been weighed down by bricks. There was £15,000 in cash in the pockets of the clothes that it was dressed in.

Three months after Calvi s death, Sergio Vaccari, a small-time drug dealer, was stabbed fifteen times in his Holland Park flat. At the time, he was in possession of masonic papers. The City of London Police linked the incident to the banker s death.

In 1987 Francesco di Carlo, a British resident, was sentenced to 25-years in prison for his part in a Mafia heroin importing racket. Nine years later it was revealed that di Carlo had confessed to the murder of Calvi.

In 1989 the forensic pathologist Professor David Bowen (1924-2011) was asked for his opinion by Italian insurers who were being asked for a $4m pay-out by Calvi s widow for a life policy. He stated that it would have been physically impossible for Calvi to have hanged himself.

In 2003 it was reported that the City of London Police had carried out a reconstruction in which the force had re-assembled the scaffolding from which Calvi s corpse had been found hanging. A man of the banker s height and weight had climbed across to the position from which the body had hung. It was discovered that such a climb would have left rust embedded in the banker s shoes. None had been found fixed to them.

At the end of that year, it emerged that a former landlord of Vaccari s had asked him to leave the flat he had been renting and had provided him with two alternatives to which he might move. One of these had been the apartment in Chelsea Cloisters where Calvi had stayed prior to his death. It was also reported the police had succeeded in establishing a link between the drug dealer and di Carlo, without whose permission no Mafia killing would have taken place in London.

In 2004 £45m of cash associated with the Banco Ambrosiano was located in The Bahamas. In June 2007 a court in Rome acquitted five defendants in a case. Two months later it was reported hundreds of millions of pounds connected to the company had been traced to the archipelago.

Location: Blackfriars Bridge, c.EC4V 4EG (orange, yellow)

Chelsea Cloisters, Sloane Avenue, SW3 3DW (purple, red)

David Backhouse 2024